{"id":617,"date":"2018-08-30T10:46:31","date_gmt":"2018-08-30T14:46:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/?p=617"},"modified":"2019-02-12T20:13:36","modified_gmt":"2019-02-13T01:13:36","slug":"pitch-wars-and-rejections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/2018\/08\/30\/pitch-wars-and-rejections\/","title":{"rendered":"Pitch Wars and Rejections"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As I&#8217;ve <a href=\"http:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/index.php\/2018\/07\/26\/on-learning-and-processing\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mentioned<\/a>, I decided to enter <em>Creampuffs<\/em> in Pitch Wars this year. (Pitch Wars is the yearly contest where unpublished writers pitch to mentors for help with their manuscript. Mentors each select one manuscript, suggest refinements over a couple of months, and then help their mentee compete to win the attention of literary agents in February.)<\/p>\n<p>Over the past month since making that decision, I&#8217;ve rewritten my query letter, gotten critiques, rewritten, repeated.\u00a0Lot of doubt in my mind whether <em>Creampuffs<\/em>, the little weirdo that it is, has what it takes. After all, a rejection that I received on Wednesday from a June query baldly stated that &#8220;we do not feel it is something we could place successfully in the current publishing climate&#8221; (and I have heard similar things in other rejections). But I kept going. I researched my potential mentors: there are a total of 101 mentors across four categories, 37 mentors in the Adult demographic; of those I found 6 that were interested in anything approaching something like <em>Creampuffs<\/em>. (An entrant is allowed to pick four.) The odds didn&#8217;t seem very good. But on Monday, I packaged all the requirements together anyway and hit submit; I have literally nothing to lose to by trying.<\/p>\n<p>This morning I woke up to this:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Good morning <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/pitchwars?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#pitchwars<\/a>!<\/p>\n<p>We received 3,452 entries this year from 3,452 wonderful writers!<\/p>\n<p>Stay tuned for category breakdowns! (and if you want to send me pet pics it *might* speed up the process a bit. Couldn&#8217;t hurt, anyway.)<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Pitch Wars (@PitchWars) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/PitchWars\/status\/1035150896093573121?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">August 30, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>OVER THREE THOUSAND PEOPLE SUBMITTED TO PITCH WARS. The vast majority of subs will be for categories I am not competing in. But still! I follow my picks for mentors and one tweeted yesterday that she&#8217;s received over 160 pitches! That&#8217;s just ONE of my picks!<\/p>\n<p>At first I felt very overwhelmed seeing the numbers in black and white like that but then I grew very calm. After all, with odds that bad, sitting and refreshing twitter or my email for good news is a clear waste of my time. I&#8217;ve done my best; maybe it will be good enough. But probably it isn&#8217;t, and rather than waiting on tenterhooks until the mentees are announced in October, I can get on with my life. I&#8217;m not allowed to pitch <em>Creampuffs<\/em> anywhere else until the mentees are announced, and that&#8217;s fine; I can take that time to figure out what next to do with it. Maybe I post it somewhere like Wattpad. Maybe I just keep querying. Maybe I switch it up to query small presses. Who knows! I had nothing to lose but a rewritten query, so I&#8217;m in the same place I was on Sunday.<\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s okay. Disappointing, sure, but okay.<\/p>\n<p>In better rejection news, I&#8217;m up to #98! That&#8217;s an average of 11 rejections a month, but even more crucially is this: it represents over 107 submissions. In eight months! I did sixteen subs in the whole of 2017! I can&#8217;t even do the math on how much a percentage increase that is! It&#8217;s so much math, you guys!<\/p>\n<p>Tomorrow&#8217;s my birthday, and I am keeping my fingers and toes crossed that the final rejections come in tomorrow so I can celebrate reaching #100 with my friends over allllll the food and drinks.<\/p>\n<p>And then&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I start again.<\/p>\n<p>(I want my year to go Sept 1 to August 31&#8211;and if I can get two more rejections by tomorrow, I can do just that. I shall call it the Feistner Fiscal Year.)<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s lots of work left to do, but I&#8217;m proud of myself for doing this much so far.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m going to eat so much birthday dim sum tomorrow, you have NO IDEA.<\/p>\n<p>See you next year! \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s lots of work left to do, but I&#8217;m proud of myself for doing this much so far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":200,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,7,9],"tags":[59,62,60,61],"class_list":["post-617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-personal","category-writing","tag-pitchwars","tag-rejectionchallenge","tag-querying","tag-rejections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=617"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":998,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617\/revisions\/998"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}